Abstract: A general Chinese phonetic keyboard setting apparatus enables the user to define a phonetic keyboard in a computer system. The user can define a key to correspond with a Chinese phonetic character (one key, one sound), or one key to correspond with several Chinese phonetic characters (one key, several sounds), or a Chinese phonetic character to correspond with several keys (one sound, several keys). Based on mutual acceptance and mutual rejection among finals, initials, medials and tones of the Chinese phonetic characters, whether or not the Chinese phonetic keyboard that was defined by the user is rational can be automatically verified to aid the user in defining a logical Chinese phonetic keyboard. Not only can the Chinese character input habit of different people can be satisfied, the Chinese character input speed can also be increased.

Abstract: In speech recognition, an unknown input signal is analyzed for its feature pattern sequence A.sub.i which is compared to prestored reference patterns grouped in categories. Each category m has a representative reference pattern B.sup.m which represents the average value of the n patterns in the catagory B.sub.n.sup.m. A first comparison (prematching) to the representative patterns is followed by a second matching to the actual reference patterns in the most likely category. The representative pattern is used in pre-matching and matching, thereby simplifying calculation and increasing accuracy.